This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Elon going to complain about another conspiracy going on while in reality it's just that when crawlers are not able to open a certain URL they simply assume that the page doesn't exist anymore. Google certainly didn't "retaliate", bots simply couldn't find those pages anymore.
The headline is actually wrong. Google did not do anything to Twitter. Twitter fucked up their own SEO by removing access to its content.
The latest in a seemingly never-ending series of self-owns. Apart from the stress it must put on their devs, it's been entertaining
They have more than one dev left?
No it's just one guy called Dev.
And he's on a H1B visa and can't leave.
My understanding is there's group of people whose visa is sponsored by Twitter. If they leave the company, they may well have to leave the country.
Crawl issues I am sure but also user experience issues. Google is sensitive to sending visitors to sites where metrics indicate users do not, like bounce rates etc. I don't use twt but if it is the case you have the be logged in to see anything now, a non-logged in user will click a link from Google hit a login page, and use the back button. I would assume Google will see that as a bad search result and use it less.
Elon, please buy Reddit and repeat your amazing ideas over there. You are so smart.
Spez is already doing his best work to fuck over the platform. Are you certain Elon could do any better?
Spez already said he admires how Elon is running Twitter.
The best part is that Elon is proving to be a pro at losing money left and right while simultaneously inventing new ways to make a social media platform suck to use.
Doesn’t sound like retaliation to me, it sounds like their scheduled web crawlers are finding that content they used to index is now no longer viewable and this removed from search results. Pretty standard. My guess is that there were 400 million URLs listed and as the crawler uncovers that they are no longer available, that number will keep dropping to reflect only content publicly viewable. If only 500 URLs are now publicly viewable (without logins) then that’s what they will index. Google isn’t a search engine for private companies (unless you pay for the service) they are a public search engine so they make an effort to ensure that only public information is indexed. Some folk game the system (like the old expertsexchange.com) but sooner or later google drops the hammer.
God, I hated expert sexchange so much. It was a blessing when stack overflow started.
I am genuinely curious. What's the role of the new CEO if this turd keeps doing everything he can to burn this ish to the ground?
She straight up admitted that she was essentially a sock puppet CEO and would offer no friction to anything Musk wanted.
Musk is a manchild who can't handle being told "no", so that's a given.
But it's smart of her to put that out in advance. It informs Musk that she will stay out of his way, and she doesn't have to take the blame for idiotic decisions made by him.
You've heard of a "walled garden".
But this... this has become a "walled right-wing dumpster".
Blocking users who are not logged in has farther reaching consequences that aren't readily apparent. For example, there was an AMBER Alert a few days ago with a short link to see more info. The link goes back to a Twitter account/tweet. All that time sensitive, useful information was behind a wall where you can't see it unless you log in. Most people aren't going to create an account just to do that.
This is such an incredible and incompetent failure for the amber alert system too though to be fair
I hope this results in companies no longer using Twitter for their communications. It's completely inappropriate.
I've missed two trains and had to take and Uber until I recently found the only place the train company reliably posts updates was Twitter, over their own damn website.
Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It's part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism's status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.
The specific moment we're in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn't be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.
I like this take, but this is a conspiracy theory take. Change a few words and this would be something regurgitated by Q fanatics.
This sounds a lot like Hanlon's razor. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Do you really believe that people like spez, Zuckerberg, Musk behave like they do because they want to do favors for other billionaires? Isn't it much more likely that they're just ... disturbed? That they are narcissistic, megalomaniac, maybe idealistic in their own believe. And in being that, they make stupid decisions because they literally work differently than regular folks.
It's funny how Spez idolizes a guy who doesn't pay his bills. It's also funny watching the hate pplatform Twitter get absolutely destroyed by its owner. The internet in 2023 is a wild and crazily changing place.
Ahh the genius that is Elon Musk, I'm sure we're all cowering at his superior intellect.
Tesla and SpaceX must be full of smart people if they can succeed despite Elon Musk shenanigans.
That is literally the complaint from ex-employees of his companies. He is Tony Stark meets Michael Scott. So much money it compensates for sheer stupidity.
Literally all you need is enough money and you can pay smart people to do impressive things, while taking all the credit.
Now do Quora.
Quora has to be one of the most useless, misdirecting "resources" out there. No idea how much of this changes once you make an account, but every single question is filled up with ads and other people's responses to other questions. It looks so confusing and messy. Who would want to sign up for a site that seems so disjointed?
Mind you this is not Google doing it on purpose. This is just Musk's genius idea of blocking tweets without being logged in. Others will drop as well, they just need some time to expire. Also, if you are wondering if they can show tweets to crawler but not show it to others Google doesn't look favorably on that. Content must appear the same to crawler as well as humans.
For one thing, this is sad because even more of the Internet is no longer reachable. The Internet shrinks, and will continue to get smaller as enshittification continues.
But on the other hand, this is really starting to look like the death knell of Twitter. It's quickly becoming extremely inconvenient to see any tweets on Twitter now.
Fine by me. I never saw any value in it, even well before Musk took over. The character limit is guaranteed to eliminate any nuance, and the interface makes it incredibly difficult to follow what discussion there is.
I think originally when Twitter was created, the idea was that it would also be accessible via SMS and so the limit was imposed in order to allow a a tweet to fit into one SMS message.
We’ve had Twitter since SMS cost per-message on most plans.
I feel like Google is going to have to find a way to effectively index federated content at some point. The only way to really get human information is from sites like Reddit and Twitter. And both of those platforms seem to be dedicated to completely imploding at the moment.
decimates
Twitter absolutely DESTROYED by RATE LIMITING and ELON
Um actually 🤓 decimating it would be 47 million links 🤓 not 227 million
Musk is moving on to the FO part of FAFO.
Between the garbage fire that is Twitter and the soulless corporate greed of Reddit, there couldn't be a better time for people to explore federated alternatives. These social media giants think they're going to generate more profit by these moves, but they're setting themselves up to go the way of MySpace.
Ah, that's gonna sting. Google is still most people's gateway to finding stuff.
That post image.
Is it just me, or is Elon looking more and more like a movie villain as time goes by?
"Google decimates Twitter search results" makes it sound like it's something Google did intentionally, rather than a simple refresh of Google's cache, now that they can't spider their way through Twitter's network.
In other words, it's Twitter that did this, not Google.
I don't support either in particular, but this shouldn't be immediately assumed as retaliation.
